Does playing video games really make you happy?

Hello everyone, today we will be exploring a little bit of thoughts to help bring discussion about if video games really help people feel happy or if they are just a cause for frustration. There are many games (like the Pokemon series) that you can see a child play and their face begins to glow. However, unfortunately there are many games that will cause a person to throw the controller on the ground and start screaming in a furious rage.

For anyone that has ever played on xbox live and played the popular games Call of Duty or Halo, you have experienced the moment where even a young boy will be throwing swears in your direction. Another populate set of games that has recently left a lot of anger in it's path is the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) video games.

Games like Dota 2 and League of Legeneds have been growing in popularity over the years but unfortunately they have also drawn the attention of the rage community. A new player will quickly be greeted with swears for simply being a new player. Even with this greeting, somehow the games and their communities continue to grow.

So why does it happen? Why do games like this inspire such rude comments from others? Everyone was bad at a game at one point right? So why is it so easy to forget that when you see someone who is struggling? I think the answers all align with the simple truth that once someone feels like they are "better" than others, they simply feel like they deserve to win. Everyone who gets in the way of what they "deserve" is a jerk and will be met with much hatred regardless of if it's the enemy team or if it's a bad team member.

So how do we stop this? With e-sports taking off the way it has and continuing to grow, is there really any hope for games to just be about having fun again? The signs are there if you look at Nintendo continuing to make games for casual players. But to the extreme gamers, is there a way we can change e-sports to take out the aggression and make people have fun, winning or losing? That is unclear as that is a battle that has been going on in sports since the beginning. Competition almost always brings out the worst in people's personalities but it can also bring out the best in their abilities.

Without competitiveness there is no desire to get better, and with no desire to get better you can't possibly improve and go above your current rank in life. We simply need to find a way to make competitive events fun for the people in them so that we can remove the anger. If we can do that, it should help people grow much faster and become even more amazing.

What do all of you think about this? Do you think there is a way to make everyone happy/having fun and still maintain the competitive nature of some video games or do you think people are simply doomed to rage every time they pick up the controller?